1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of on-line catalogs, and more particularly to generating customized versions of an on-line catalog for each of an arbitrary number of different buyers, the customized versions being the results of rules-based searches of a central catalog database maintained by the seller.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advent of Internet based commerce, organizations on both the buy and sell side of business-to-business (B2B) procurement relationships have sought to harness computer networks as a means for automating the procurement process between them. To facilitate e-commerce, and particularly e-procurement, suppliers of goods and services have developed electronic catalogs by which potential buyers can electronically receive and display information regarding the goods and services offered by the supplier, including descriptive information, pictures and prices.
For many reasons, a seller does not often find it desirable to supply the same catalog to all buyers. It may be preferable for a catalog targeted to businesses to have a different product focus than a catalog for individual consumers, and the scope of products in a catalog may vary from one type of business to another, as well as from one type of consumer to another. For example, the types of computers and peripherals offered to businesses may provide higher performance and as a result are more costly than computer equipment targeted toward consumers. The types of goods and services marketed to one type of business often vary significantly from those targeted toward another type of business. Moreover, buyers that purchase high volumes of products/services will often negotiate unique pricing agreements with sellers that afford significant discounts compared to lower volume purchasers. Thus, it would be highly desirable from the seller's perspective for each buyer or group of buyers to have their own unique catalog, one that is customized to reflect the individual product interests of each customer or customer group, as well their unique business processes and relationships.
For a seller carrying many different items (or providing many classes and types of services), maintaining even one version of an e-catalog can be extremely difficult. To maintain several custom versions of an electronic catalog, a physical manifestation of each custom version is typically created and each version must be maintained and updated as the catalog data changes. Each time a product or service is added, or its attributes or attribute values are changed, every physical manifestation of a version of the catalog must be individually updated to ensure that each version reflects the changes in the catalog data. Each version essentially is obsolete until updated.
Although each version of an electronic catalog is maintained by computer, the fact that an update must be performed for each existing version of the catalog can be time-consuming, labor intensive and prone to error. Moreover, updating multiple versions of the catalog is made even more onerous because they typically reside at different physical locations, to many of which the seller has no direct access. For example, some versions of the catalog may have been published to buyers' proprietary retail web sites, some to public marketplace web sites and still other versions to procurement networks. These common repositories for at least a subset of a seller's catalog information typically are not directly accessible to the seller for making direct updates to the catalog information. Rather, catalog updates for these buyers typically must occur somewhat indirectly and through the cooperation of the buyer. In these contexts, the buyer usually performs the ultimate integration of the custom versions of the catalog into the buyer's web site or procurement network.
Thus, for the seller to provide customized versions of its catalogs to all of its potential customers, prior art techniques have required the seller to assume a tremendous administrative burden to maintain the various versions of its catalog, leading to discrepancies and errors. For example, some versions may continue to include products or services no longer offered by the seller. Another error that can occur is that some of the prices in a version of the catalog have become obsolete. Buyers attempting to purchase products or services still in the catalog but no longer available through the seller will not be happy that they were inconvenienced in such a manner. Obsolete prices can mean lost money to a seller if new higher prices are not reflected by a custom version of the seller's catalog. Thus, trying to maintain and update so many versions of a catalog becomes risky as well as labor-intensive, which tends to offset many of the advantages of providing electronic catalogs.
It would be highly desirable from the seller's perspective if the seller could maintain all catalog data in a central database and in one physical location, and then generate customized versions of its catalogs for its various buyers and buyer groups based on the central database. It would also be preferable if buyers were coupled to the catalog database through a network, so that the seller could present the customized versions of its catalog data to its buyers on a virtual basis, rather than publishing and delivering physical manifestations of the customized versions.